On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 12:19:50PM +0800, Nikanth Karthikesan wrote: > When the total dirty pages exceed vm_dirty_ratio, the dirtier is made to do > the writeback. But this dirtier may not be the one who took the system to this > state. Instead, if we can track the dirty count per-file, we could throttle > the dirtier of a file, when the file's dirty pages exceed a certain limit. > Even though this dirtier may not be the one who dirtied the other pages of > this file, it is fair to throttle this process, as it uses that file. Nikanth, there's a more elegant solution in upstream kernel. See the comment for task_dirty_limit() in commit 1babe1838. NFS may want to limit per-file dirty pages, to prevent long stall time inside the nfs_getattr()->filemap_write_and_wait() calls (and problems like that). Peter Staubach has similar ideas on it. Thanks, Fengguang -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>